Antigua Penny Puce by Robert Graves

Antigua, Penny, Puce by Robert Graves

published 1936

 

 

Miss Palfrey appeared [in court] in a chestnut-coloured costume with a soft hat of a chestnut-lilac shade and a scarf of a soft silvery material

 

I explained recently that when I was young and haunted the public library, I used to see Robert Graves books without ever reading them. I was a big fan of Graham Greene, busy reading everything he had ever written – he was still alive and still producing at that time. Robert Graves was on the shelf above, and I would notice Count Belisarius – which I finally read last year when blogfriend Roger Allen connected it up with the lives of Justinian and Theodora – and this book. And I was very impressed with its title, eye-catching and strange, but  I assumed that Penny Puce was a person, from Antigua. I picked up a second-hand copy much later, and first read it years after that – and loved it. I decided to check if it still seems as good, and it does.

I did like I Claudius and Claudius the God, and Graves' touching and confounding memoir Goodbye to All That. I read The Long Weekend, and I had his reference books about Greek Myths. And I am very fond indeed of his enchanting poem Welsh Incident, with the best last line ever –

 ‘I was coming to that’ 

-a sentence I like to use as often as possible.

[Nowadays I link the poem with the un-Welsh Anthony Gormley statues on Crosby beach on Merseyside – the art event is called Another Place. I think the figures are the watchers rather than being the incomers from the poem]

Anyway. After all that, Antigua Penny Puce is nothing like any of his other works that I’ve read – you would never guess it was the same author. It is said that someone challenged Graves to write a novel that wasn’t about the past.

And now for the reveal:

Antigua, Penny, Puce is a postage stamp: rare, probably unique, and thus very valuable. Place of origin, initial value, colour.

Antigua, sixpence, green

Stamp-collecting – philately – is not, I think the subject of very many novels. We were only recently discussing bell-ringing as an equally obscure topic – but a great writer can make Antigua Penny Puce, and The Nine Tailors, into great books.

At the centre of the story are a brother and a sister: the book is about stamps, and abstruse points of law, but it is also very much about two siblings who are metaphorically at each other’s throats, and it is simultaneously hilarious and cringe-making.

They grow up in middle-class comfort in the home counties: public school and the golf club. This extract gives an excellent flavour I think as the siblings reminisce:

‘I admired the Chapel people for breaking our windows when Father came out strong for Sunday golf.’

‘Oh, did you? And I suppose you approved of the Wesleyan minister’s protest?’

‘I think it was the bravest thing I ever saw in my life. A man who can lie all day on the first tee of a famous links in the form of a cross, feet neatly together and a Bible in each of his outspread hands, and get away with it, too——’

There was stamp-collecting too, a standard hobby for young boys at the time. Oliver gets the collection going, and Jane, a year younger, gets involved and helps. There is a key moment when they agree that it is ‘our’ collection, to keep Jane quiet and appease the parents.

The years go by, the parents are dead, and the grown-up children scarcely see each other. Oliver is an aspiring writer, Jane is a wildly successful and famous theatre manager and actress: she has her own company, in partnership with her childhood friend Edith. As it happens, it was Edith who had given the Antigua stamp to Jane for the stamp collection.

Jane decides she wants half the stamp collection, which Oliver had automatically taken charge of. (There is some other disputed property from the family home.) She wants the Antigua stamp. Oliver thinks she has no right to it. He also thinks his sister is

‘a highly intelligent, grey-eyed, black-souled, acrobatic, aristocratic snake in the grass.’

Their fight does not disappoint in any way. It is extremely complicated, back and forth, and turning several times on unusual points of law. (It seems certain, btw, that the stamp is imaginary: Graves apparently researched widely to check that it did not exist, but would sound convincing. He invented an extraordinary backstory of how the stamp came to exist, and came into the possession of the siblings.)

We are generally on Jane’s side, and Oliver is rather absurd, but she is by no means wholly in the right, and behaves cleverly but incorrectly at times. She is a much more entertaining and attractive character, but not worried about perfect behaviour, and one can’t approve of everything just on the grounds that Oliver is a pain. They are both devious, manipulative and duplicitous, and both of them have got carried away in pursuit of the blooming stamp…

Characters in the book (and it’s not clear if Graves shares their view) had an extraordinary idea about identical twin women: that only one of the pair is able to have babies. This is obvious nonsense, but has a huge role to play in the story: it is simultaneously annoying the way it is believed, and very funny the way it plays out. There is almost a thought that the fertility moves between them.

Edith gets a makeover, though with little detail (male authors, eh? – and it should be spelled Molyneux) :

Edith was back in April. She was looking unusually pretty, and had done her hair in a different way and was dressed very becomingly. [Her sister] Edna had given her a very good time and lectured her on her appearance and told her to stop at Paris on her way back and put herself in the hands of Molineux, or someone, and engage a French maid: for what was the good of having lots of money if you went about looking like a first-year Polytechnic student?’

(Blog fave Margery Allingham was a Polytechnic student in her day – a bit earlier than this – so I like to think she was one of the examples…)

The stamp goes to auction, which is interrupted very dramatically. There will be another auction later. The legal case is equally exciting, several times, back and forth, and making the most of the possibilities.

In this post

Elizabeth Ironside: a perfect picture of the 1990s

I explain that a fictional court case must have last-minute surprise witnesses for a bit of excitement (‘Watch My Cousin Vinny, ya dopes’ I said). Graves does a terrific job, and the character of Mildred Young is wonderfully well done.

This is an excellent book, and one that should be better-known. It seems not even to be in print now, which is a shame.

It has a lot to say about siblings and families, about the law. And of course about stamp-collecting. And I think it’s very unusual in the way it treats women – Graves’s male contemporaries were not giving us characters like Jane in their novels. And it’s always implicit (not hammered home) that Oliver was the son and got opportunities and education not offered to Jane, all completely wasted on him.

 It’s a book to make you smile and to make you think…. Well-worth reading.

Chestnut coloured suit from The Vintage

Paris fashions of the 1930s including Molyneux (2^nd from left), NYPL.

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